


All That We Owe

by ParadoxR



Series: Hit the Sky [7]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Backstory, Beginnings, Earn Your Spot, Gen, Military, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 19:06:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2399507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadoxR/pseuds/ParadoxR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Admit it or don’t, but it’s pretty obvious who they’d been <em>planning</em> to have lead the first team.”<br/>The knot in her stomach freezes in place. “That was before the nuclear warhead.”</p><p>Standalone in canon or series fanon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spend Their Lives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [steadfast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steadfast/gifts).



> This fic is both canon compliant-ish and the next step in my own fanon’s Sam & Daniel friendship. In canon, It’s set in early s1 after Hammond says he’ll consider adding Daniel to SG-1, but before he or Sam are really confirmed as permanent members. They’ve been hearing some whispered reasons which it might not happen.
> 
> Thank you to bethanyactually for the beta!

“Is she in there?”

_Seriously?_ “You really do need to sleep, you know.” But Sam opens the door for him anyway. And she’s suddenly grateful that the nice if mildly Napoleonic doctor hasn’t checked in on her own quarters.

“I have to get back out there.” Daniel taps edgily on the doorframe.

Sam sighs and turns on the rest of the lights. “Then _sleep_.”

“Do you think they’ll let me?” He’s more turning in circles than pacing in her small loaner room.

Sam squints at the brightness and the sheer exhaustion. “Probably sometimes.” She pulls out a chair for him and tries not to immediately fall back asleep on the foot of her bed. “But they’ll really need your help analyzing everything that comes back.” He’s making her dizzy.

Daniel pivots and grabs the back of the chair. “I can do both.” He _will_ do both.

“Daniel…” _‘Daniel’ what?_ God, but she wants to, too. _Yeah, because what you want should matter at all when Apophis may want to blow up the world._

“I’d be better at it that way. This—this isn’t like anything I’ve ever done before, Sam. I don’t know these languages. I’m barely starting to grasp what this sort of enslavement does to their cultures.”

Sam blinks at the one-eighty. _That’s reassuring._

“The only insight I have is from the time I spent _living_ on Abydos. Being with those people, listening to them. Talking to them.” _Loving them._ “Anyone new they bring in won’t have even _seen_ a Stargate.”

Sam tries to decide against coffee. “Daniel, we stillbarely know anything about the Stargate.” She sighs. “If we had more of that experience, it’d be a different story.” _If you lived long enough to get it._ “But every special ops officer you’ve met has spent at least two years training on this work. Actually, every one you’ve met has spent more like twelve.”

Daniel bolts up from leaning on the chair. “But they _don’t_! Don’t you get it? No one’s trained for this. First contacts with previously enslaved alien cultures?” He drums on the fake wood.

Sam tries not to fidget. _You’d be trained for this if they’d let you. _ “Doctor, the US military has six-man commando teams specifically qualified in long-range reconnaissance behind enemy lines. We have special ops units whose forte is training indigenous forces and supporting insurgencies. There are some who specialize particularly in broaching alliances with isolated villages.” _‘Sir, but where is he?’_ “Linguists that speak a dozen languages, emergency teams to recover advanced technologies, foreign internal defense” _‘Jonas, WAIT!’_ “hostage rescue, grassroots diplomacy, hazardous humanitarian missions.” She breathes. “They’re not physicists, Daniel. They’re not pilots; they’re not archeologists. They literally spend their professional lives doing exactly this.” _Until they die young._ “I know it’s hard, but those guys really are our best chance.”

“I’m not saying they’re not. I just need to be there too.” He flips through the notes on her desk.

“Daniel.” _‘Welcome to Dammam, Lieutenant.’_ “There’s a reason that _no one_ on any of those teams is untrained. It’s always been easier to cut that corner, but we can’t.” _‘Where can I help, sir?’_  “And now we’re sending those guys halfway across the galaxy through a one-way door. They _need_ each other.” She stumbles on. _‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing, sir?’ ‘Who’s going to shoot us out here, Major?’_ “You can’t ask them to take that risk. You can’t ask their _families_ to take that risk.” She chokes her closing throat. _‘Wolff! MAYDAY! JIM!’_

Daniel finally lands in the chair and catches his head in his hands. They’re wet. “I _can’t_ just stay here.”

Sam gulps. _‘Mrs. Wolff, I have no words to express how much Major Jim Wolff meant…’_

He looks up at her. “I really can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to.” Daniel exhales his own defensiveness. “I _do_ want to go. But I also _have_ to go. If they want my help…” he trails off. “They don’t, do they?” There’s a mirror over her shoulder. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“No.” Sam says directly. Her help, they don’t want. His… hell, they took him the first time _._ “They need you, and they know it.” And maybe he’s right. Maybe she can still get him out there somehow. _You’ve spent more of your adult life getting DC to do stupider things._

Daniel focuses back on her sunken blue eyes. She’s still sunburnt head to toe and bandaged worse that he is. But she believes it. He nods and turns back to her desk notes. “May I?”

“Of course.” Sam says to his back. She takes the chance to massage her temples. _How the hell are you going to pull that one off?_

Daniel sits down. He turns on the desk lamp two minutes later.

Sam watches the light flicker on. _Single-minded curiosity._ “It really is dangerous, you know.”

His gaze bolts up to the concrete wall. “I know.”

She freezes. _Seriously? To him? _“I’m sorry, I…”

“No, you’re right.” He huffs ironically and turns to her. “I really don’t think about that sometimes.”

Sam’s pretty sure she wouldn’t be thinking either.


	2. And He Should Be

“Teal’c wants me to.”

Sam straightens up on the foot of her bed and blinks the too-light sleep from her eyes. “Mmm?”

“Teal’c wants me to.” Daniel repeats without looking up from the desk he’s commandeered.

“Oh.” Sam tries to recover what they’d been talking about. She’s getting more and more endeared to his poor sense of time. It’s reminds her of when she’s free to close her lab door instead of supervise a staff or prove she really can command a rifle squad at The Basic School.

“Yeah.” Daniel tries to scribble with her pen while simultaneously tapping it absentmindedly.

“To what, exactly?” Had she slept through something?

“Go back out with him. He doesn’t like the rest of the people here much.”

Sam winces. “Yeah, I can see how imprisonment might have that effect on a person.”

Daniel nods and then jerks up, stopping shy of the imaginary light bulb igniting above his head. “Not you, of course. He likes you.”

That wakes her up fully. “Really?”

“He thinks you’re the only one strong enough to actually defeat the Goa’uld.” Daniel’s grin is genuine, though his smirk at her reaction isn’t.

“What?!” Sam squints at the dream.

“It makes sense.” He offers scholarly. “You made the Stargate work. That’s a god’s magic in the Jaffa’s book. The rest of us… I mean, he trusts Jack and he knows that I have a”—he tries not to pause—“reliable personal stake in it, but you’re the golden ticket.”

“Wow. That’s…” No pressure.

“Yeah.” Daniel smiles. “He wants us both back out there. I think I can leverage that.”

Sam shakes her head quickly. “No.” She finds her feet despite the ensuing dizziness. “Daniel, I’m not here to beat the system.”

Who the heck needs this system? They have a defected five-star general on their side. “You know he knows more about this than anyone.”

“And his input is weighted that way. But I’m not going to blackmail my way onto SG-1, Doctor. If that’s what’s supposed to happen, it will.” She’s leans over his shoulder and flips the page, effectively changing the subject.

Daniel skims as she turns past off-world protocol suggestions and onto staff weapon reverse engineering. She needs it. “Sam,  I get that you feel the need to trust their system. But don’t you think you should participate in it a little more?”

The knot in her stomach freezes in place. “What do you mean?”

“Push for your position.” He says, following her finger along the characteristically incomprehensible ‘Potential Enhancement of SS190 Cartridges Based on Ma’tok Staff Plasma Technology ’. “Don’t you want to go back out there?”

“Daniel, never in the history of the US military has anyone ever gotten anywhere purely because they wanted to. You have to earn it.” Or you have to lose crewmates that did.

“You have earned it, Sam.” Daniel turns and faces her. “Captain, I may not know much about the military, but I’m not an idiot. Your lab had been getting that Gate to work for years before Jack or I ever showed up. Admit it or don’t, but I don’t need PhDs to pick out who they’d been planning to have lead the first team.”

Damn, her stomach’s really starting to hurt. “That was before the nuclear warhead.”

He snorts sardonically. “Trust the military to blow up the first thing it finds.” Because isn’t history just rife with examples where cutting off the Hydra’s head has worked out well. She might’ve still been with you now.

“It’s done, Daniel.” His eyes jump to her temper, and she blinks slowly. “My job was to lead a test team. Clear the Gate, secure the perimeter, hold it from aerial and ambush attack, and run tests. Retake it if necessary. I had strict orders never to engage anything like an organized military. Heck, most basic infantry lieutenants spent four months longer in tactical training than I could.”

“Because you’re a woman?”

She looks down to him in surprise. “Yes.” Earth is going to lose this war because you’re not a man. She prefers to write that off as egotistical.

“And that’s the system you’re trusting?” The system that immediately nuked the galaxy? “You don’t think you should push a little harder?”

How the hell hard do you think I’ve been pushing, Doctor? “Pushing hard is how I got this entire program to exist in the first place.”

Daniel jerks towards the tone in her voice. He elects to stand.

Sam steps back. She’s done nothing but push. She’d been barely clinging onto that command for years, or he’d be having this conversation with any one of twenty highly decorated combat engineers.

And he should be.

Daniel pushes his glasses upwards. “You blame yourself, don’t you?”

She doesn’t answer.


	3. For Your Responsibility

“Apophis is not your fault.” He squares his shoulders to her.

Sam leans into the hit. “Doctor, Earth’s entire existence on the modern Stargate network is my fault. I’m even the one that petitioned for you in the end.”

“And I had no idea what was going to happen. And neither did you.” He manages not to reach out to her.

“I should have.” She focuses past his shoulder. Risk assessment and prioritization is her job, dammit.

Daniel’s fortunately still too diplomatic for ‘that’s a load of crap’. But that’s a load of crap. He manages not to huff. “Sam, this is humanity. This is the pinnacle of humanity.” He catches her shoulder. Her gaze doesn’t move. “You did that. You got us to the real final frontier.”

She forces her composure into his gaze. “What I got us is a war, Doctor Jackson. One where good people are going to die.” Forgive her if that’s curiosity-deflating.

Daniel sighs into her lost gaze. “Sam, I wouldn’t’ve even met Sha’re if it weren’t for you.”

The foot of the bed sinks under her. Her hands are wet.

He sits down gingerly. The captain suddenly looks far more than three years younger than him. “Sam.”

She forces a wet breath. “Daniel, I’m truly glad you see it that way. But I can’t be responsible for someone else’s…” She can’t go back out. He’s right. You should. You have to learn.

He smiles sadly. “Captain, if it weren’t for your responsibility, we’d probably be dead right now.”

“I’m not ready for this.” She shakes her head.

“Sam, no one is ready for this.” He leans forward to catch her eyes. “Don’t you at least owe it to them to point that out?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cut here is to stay both canon and fanon compliant. In canon, the rest is history. In fanon, we will progress immediately to SJ pre-ship town.


End file.
